Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word
by earwig
Summary: Three times, Mac was given the responsibility to raise daughters that weren't his. Set post Georgie's death.


Title: Sorry Seems to be The Hardest Word  
Author: earwig  
Prompt: 66 - Apologies  
Pairing/Character(s): Mac  
Rating: G  
Disclaimer: Nothing associated with General Hospital belongs to me.  
Word Count: 816  
Spoilers/Warnings: Set post Georgie's death.  
Summary: Most days he thinks he should apologize to the parents who trusted him with their children.  
Author's Notes: Written for **theechochorus**.

Three times, Mac was given the responsibility to raise daughters that weren't his.

Three times, Mac feels like he failed both the parents who left their children behind, and the children themselves.

Most days he thinks he should apologize to the parents who trusted him with their children. The others, he feels like he should apologize to the children.

Mac wasn't ready to raise Robin. But when Robert and Anna "died", he stepped in and did the best he could. At first he thought he was doing an okay job. She seemed to be as healthy and happy as one could expect from a teenage girl who'd buried all four of her parent figures, not to mention a grandmother in her short life.

Then she met Stone, and Mac realized how ill equipped he really was to raise a daughter.

When Robin told him that she tested positive for HIV, Mac viewed himself as a complete failure. He tried to be strong and brave for Robin's sake, but when he was alone he broke down. He took a trip to the cemetery, to visit his brother's empty grave, and beg his headstone for forgiveness.

Mac wasn't surprised when it didn't come.

If Robin was the daughter he didn't expect, Maxie and Georgie were the ones he chose and wanted desperately to be his.

When he fell in love with Felicia, he fell in love with Maxie as well. He didn't try to be her father, not back then, because even if he was doing the day to day child rearing that Frisco couldn't be bothered to, Maxie worshiped her father. He'd never have taken that away from her willingly. So when Maxie got sick, he took it upon himself to find Frisco, to bring him home to the daughter who desperately needed him.

Mac didn't stop to think that bringing Frisco back would change his life with Maxie and Felicia forever.

Ultimately, it gave him his family, though not in a way that Mac ever would have anticipated. Frisco's sudden appearance and final disappearance gave him Georgie, the only one of his girls that he got to love from the moment he laid eyes on her.

Georgie was the only one of his girls in whose eyes he didn't have to measure up to another father.

For awhile, Mac had the family he wanted and hadn't expected, all at once. Felicia, Robin, Georgie, and Maxie, all his girls, in one place, all there for him to love and protect. But for Mac, nothing that good ever seemed to last.

Robin left first, heading back to Paris, where he knew she could accomplish all her dreams and be safe, something she hadn't been in years. He made her promise to call once a week and write as often as she could, all to reassure him that she'd be alright in the world by herself, forgetting that if there was one thing Robin was used to, it was being alone.

Felicia disappeared next. He should have known that when he fell in love with a woman that thrived on adventure and curiosity, that she'd never quite be settled in one place, comfortable enough to sit still and just relax.

Mac had been willing to take that chance.

But Maxie and Georgie weren't given the same opportunity. So when the girls decided they'd rather stay with him after he and Felicia split up and Felicia ran off to Texas to take care of a grandmother that could have easily been brought to Port Charles, he stepped up again to take care of children that weren't his.

At least not biologically, that is. They'd always been his children at heart.

Their teenage years convinced Mac once again that he was a failure and ill equipped to raise daughters and gradually turned his brown hair gray. Between Maxie's web-cam drama and Georgie's teenage marriage, by the time the girls were in college and finding themselves, he thought the worst of it was behind him.

Then Georgie was found strangled to death in the park.

They say no parent should have to bury their child, but there's no trite expression of sympathy for step-parents who pick up the slack for parents who can't or won't stay.

When Felicia came back for the funeral, Mac tried to apologize to her, but couldn't quite find the words. In their shared grief, it didn't really matter who was more at fault, who had failed Georgie more completely.

Not long after the funeral, Mac made his way to Georgie's grave and knelt before it, crouching in the snow. He traced his fingers over the dates with too few years between them, forever etched in marble, and a few stray years trickled down his cheeks, freezing in the January cold.

For a long while, he didn't speak, and when words finally came, they were simply, "I'm sorry."


End file.
